Hot Meals Help Fortify Kids Against Poverty

FAMILY FUND - Holiday Campaign

December 10, 2004|By Jerry W. Jackson, Sentinel Staff Writer

The sun is creeping low into the pine trees when children in the Police Athletic League program gather for an afternoon Kids Cafe meal: steaming plates of potatoes and vegetables, country fried chicken, orange juice and chocolate pudding.

The kids chatter about the fun they had that day -- all about school and classmates and who did what. Then the talk circles back to food.

"My favorite is pizza," says Montravious Alston, 8, a third-grader at Rio Grande Charter School. "Squash is the only thing I don't like."

Iridan Meroni, 6, known as "Little D," says his favorites are hot dogs and hamburgers. Then the kindergartner declares with a whisper: "I like vegetables." His grin fills his face and lights the room.

Education specialist Vivian Tindal, who is in charge of the 55 children in the after-school tutoring and recreation program in west Orange County, said she sleeps better knowing that Little D and the 5- to 12-year-olds under her care go home with full stomachs.

"It's very difficult to teach a hungry child. I'm speaking for myself -- I'm difficult when I'm hungry," Tindal said with a laugh at the Hal P. Marston building at the Northwest Community Center in Pine Hills. "Unfortunately a lot of my children don't get another meal [at home] after this."

The Kids Cafe program is sponsored by Second Harvest Food Bank of Central Florida. The Orlando-based nonprofit is on the front line fighting hunger. For 22 years, the agency has labored to bring the nation's leftover bounty to those who need it most.

The agency, which funnels food to about 500 nonprofits in six counties, benefits from the Orlando Sentinel Family Fund Holiday Campaign. Nonprofit groups take the Second Harvest food and give it -- boxed, bagged, canned or fresh -- to individuals and families through their own programs.

"We have enough food in the United States. The challenge is to get it to people who need it," said Gregory Higgerson, development director for Second Harvest.

The Orlando agency, part of a nationwide network, delivered 12.6 million pounds in the past fiscal year to groups serving the needy.

In the coming fiscal year, which ends June 30, Second Harvest projects that it will deliver a record high 15 million pounds, a 19 percent increase.

Second Harvest's 35,000-square-foot warehouse hums with a steady stream of trucks, unloading food donated by companies such as General Mills, Frito-Lay and Winn-Dixie. A small but critical part comes from the community through food drives.

Volunteers from churches, schools and companies sort through boxes and cans to make sure they are securely packaged and not out of date. With a paid staff of 35, Second Harvest relied on volunteers for 27,000 hours of help in the past year, the equivalent of 12 full-time workers.

"We couldn't make it without them," Higgerson said.

Kids Cafe is a Second Harvest program that delivers free meals directly to children, with much of the food coming from kitchens of some of the best restaurants and hotels in town. Hot meals from Walt Disney World's top restaurants, for example, are trucked to one of the 11 Kids Cafe sites in Central Florida. It's excess food that once went to waste.

Since the sit-down meal program began in the Orlando area in 1995, the number of children served has swelled from 50 to about 500, said Andrea Piel, senior manager of the Kids Cafe program.

The cafe in the Police Athletic League's Pine Hills program was launched a year ago. In addition to the children in the PAL program, one meal per day at the center is open to any hungry child in the neighborhood, which is filled with low-income families.

Tindal, who was reared in a stable two-parent household and never went hungry, said she was taught to give back to the community because of the blessings they enjoyed. "We were poor, but we didn't realize it," she said.

As this day's group of children leaves, laughing and jostling, Tindal hopes the Kids Cafe kids will look back years from now and come to realize: They were poor once, and never knew it.